The Talk

The Myth of Being Happy

Are we too obsessed with the idea of being happy? Is Hollywood just the latest model of the happiness-myth machine? Richard Schoch draws on thinkers from Socrates to now to question the meaning of happiness and when it became a human right rather than the reward for a good life.

Speaker

Transcript

EXCERPT

Richard Schoch: Beautiful weather, beautiful surroundings and like-minded people talking about things you are interested in; if they are not a recipe for happiness I don’t know what is! But the problem is, is that if your being happy is dependant upon days like this everyday, then we are in for trouble. In fact the first half of my day today was miserable! I had to take the train from London, there were delays and break downs and all sorts of things. So if you think happiness is just a pleasant arrangement of circumstances in your life, which many of us do, then we are setting ourselves up for a hard fall I think.

As an historian I try and take the long view of what happiness is or rather the different ways that people have understood and experienced happiness over the centuries. People have been thinking about the meaning of happiness for as long as they’ve been thinking about anything. It’s very much in the news today but it’s a very old topic. We don’t have to accept the latest ‘happiness public policy agenda’ we can go all the way back and say what are the different ways people have understood and experienced happiness in the past. I think this journey will take us to some very surprising places. If you take the long view all the back to Aristotle what you find is that the story of being happy is a pretty unhappy one. About two thousand years ago when the Greeks tried to answer ‘what does the good life mean?’ they thought of happiness as a civic virtue that demanded a lifetime’s cultivation.

But today, we think of happiness as a birth right; swallow a pill and get happy, hire a life coach and smile. We have reduced the meaning of happiness to the narrowest possible dimensions, the thinnest possible shape, maximising pleasure and minimising pain. That’s the recipe for happiness. I think that unlike most people that have ever lived on this planet we today feel most entitled to live a happy life and we constantly worry that we aren’t sitting on top of the world every single minute of the day. This is why self-help books generate two billion dollars in sales every single year and the desire industry, ‘botox jabbers’ and life coaches, take in even more money. Without question happiness has become our generation’s luxury item, the product of choice. We are consumers of happiness. The Greeks said you had to be an achiever of happiness, we say we are consumers of happiness. We want to be happy and we want it now. We are driven by selfishness.

I think it’s a pretty sorry state of affairs that there are so many pressures putting us in at the wrong side of the happiness debate. If you look at how people have thought about being happy for thousands of years, the way we think about it today is very unusual and would not have made any sense to most people who have lived on this planet. I mentioned earlier that happiness is really in the headlines today and in a sense it’s been in the news on and off for about the last ten years. It began in the social sciences, through psychology and through economics. Happiness in the past ten years has been colonised by the psychologists and the economists. They have very insightful things to say about being happy, this is true. However, they ignore a lot of the things that have been said over the years. I came in to the happiness debate with the feeling of discontent, that this research was all very interesting but that there was something more.

The economic research said all very standard things, good job, nice house, and loving family. These are not insights; these are things you could have told me. This is true for the psychologists too; they reduced happiness to just feeling good i.e. maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. There are several problems with this. The first is that none of us can be sure that the pleasures we want in life, money, fame and beauty, just to name the top three, are going to be the pleasures that we get. So being happy is random, down to luck. It’s no coincidence that happy and haphazard are related linguistically. But do you want to leave your happiness down to luck? What we all want is a happiness that we can bank on, that’s reliable and that we can work towards, not down to luck. Secondly, if you think about it it’s not right to feel happy all the time. There are many normal moments in life when we ought not to feel good. For example, apologizing for someone we love, there are lots of moments where happy feelings are inappropriate.

I believe Aristotle in the Eudemian ethics extolled the ideal of Eudaimonia... the fulfilling of ones potential, presumably in 'good faith', befitting of a person of good ethic not hedonic, immoral, pleasure seeking.

Whilst I'm sure you could find moral failing and pleasure seeking (why should people who have difficulty with moderation have a monopoly on the meaning of pleasure? Because there's so many of them, and so many careerist politicians prepared to pander to them) in the person's I've listed, (Newton was allegedly a rather difficult man, but not immoral) for the most part I think you'll find they were of exemplary character.

Mungo Park, as I understand it, was a man of great integrity but the French Revolution raised the stakes on, well everything... on his second expedition Park didn't wish to be accompanied by a small army, let alone under the command of the likes of Capt John Martyn, but the agenda had changed and the rest is history.

In a recent book about money Felix Martin makes it quite clear that the Quaker's made their moral code work to spectacular effect (no surprise to me that Capt Cook was apprenticed to the Quaker John Walker) a very similar thing, I believe, can be said of the Jews, people who inherited the jewish ethic.

I find it hard to believe that humans will ever be in short supply of 'hunger' but certainly a great many, in the pursuit of 'happiness', will lay waste their powers in a Brave New World like orgy of excess. They are doing just that, spectacularly.

It's not so much about contentment but gratitude, not so much about ambition but aspiration, excellence, integrity, self respect, dignity. If these qualities don't lead to happiness, tough! They are imperative.

Philosophy Byteson16/04/2013 5:43pm

Hum I always hear mums here and there saying that they want to teach their kids to learn about contentment, instead of being happy. I definitely see the value in that, it's good to sit back on a chair, relax and enjoy what we've got, but isn't there a risk that people will lack some bite in life. Some sort of hunger for more which is what drives humanity forward no? To be or not to be happy ?

Kiljoyon05/03/2013 4:53pm

The expression 'So long as you're happy that's all that matters', does that apply to serial murderers?

Not so long back I read Persuasion by Jane Austen. Anne Eliot, I think she was eighteen or so, was persuaded to end a romantic relationship with a certain Capt Wentworth. It caused her considerable unhappiness for some eight, perhaps nine, years. That her immediate family were either vain, ridiculous or neurotic (perhaps all of those) obviously didn't help, she had pretty much resigned herself to being a spinster.

But, she retained her dignity, and her self respect; anyone whose opinion was worth knowing, who knew her, respected, admired and loved her.

She eventually did get back together with Capt Wentworth and found happiness - and I along with many others was happy for her - even if she was a fiction.

Hanif Aminion11/02/2013 5:22pm

An insightful and articulate talk. Our contemporary society's obsession with seeking happiness in material things and immediate gratification is clearly problematic, but surely being happy isn't just about having a long term view of one's life goals and values? The persuit of happiness should be sensitive to the idiosyncracies of an individual. we need to be less prescriptive about the meaning of happiness. What makes one person happy doesn't necessarily make their neighbour happy, and maybe the mistake is actually persuing happiness in the first place.

True happiness doesn't come from fulfilling some kind of criteria or formula. Maybe the reason we're not happy is because we keep searching for it like it's the holy grail. We need to stop talking about finding a way to happiness and just get on with living our lives. It's a false idol that we're worshipping here. Happiness is fleeting, so concentrating all our energy on it is only going to fuel our dissatisfaction with our lives.